Stumpy

My junior year of high school I dated a guy named Derek. And I called him Stumpy. Then again, maybe it was the duck that I called Stumpy. The duck was small and stuffed and yellow and fuzzy and wore a little vest. Wait a minute, maybe Derek wore the vest. Derek was sweet and totally hot in a high school rebel nerd kinda way. I know for a fact that Derek took a picture of the duck drinking wine straight from the bottle and in the picture one or the other of them was wearing the vest. And one of the other of them was definitely called Stumpy. But I can't for the life of me remember which one.

This was a long-running inside joke between Derek and me, but I don't remember why.

So here's a story I do remember. Derek was a year ahead of me in school and went off to college and we broke up. When he came home for the summer he stopped by my house to drop off some stuff of mine that he still had. As a joke, to cut the tension of seeing each other again he wore this fake scraggly old mountain main beard when he came to the door. I cracked up when I saw him and reached up to pull the beard off.

You know where this is going, right?

Yup - that was his actual beard attached to his actual face by 100% actual hair. Which I pulled actually very hard as part of the joke. Nope, haven't heard from him since.